Overview
Inventory management quickly becomes a challenge for new players. A common misconception is that you have to purchase a Premium Set to provide a reasonable amount of inventory space. However, using selective inventory management, you can maximize the space provided to optimize your storage space potential while spending little to no real world cash. Feel free to tailor these to your personal preference as you progress through the game. These are just a general guideline to get you started and help you develop a system of organization for quality of life improvement.
A Quick Note About Item Selection
In both your inventory and the storage menus, you can select multiple items and manipulate them in batches. You can do this using a either a controller or a keyboard and mouse. With a controller, hold the right trigger and use the direction pad to select consecutive items and tap the right trigger to add single items to an existing selection. With a keyboard and mouse, you can hold shift click the first item and the the last item you want to select and then you can use control and click to add individual items to your selection.
Using either of these methods, you can move items between your inventory and storages as well as selecting multiple items for selling at merchants or for exchange in the swap shop. There are some menus where this does not work such as item dismantling in the crafting menu. We will discuss these topics in greater detail under the following sections.
Character Inventory
There are a few categories items that should be retained at all times for general gameplay purposes. These are items that you will generally need to have on-hand for standard gameplay requirements, so keeping them with you is important.
You may customize these as you see fit. For example, a player with a skill that automatically uses healing devices might choose not to carry Monomates to improve survivability by allowing the skill to produce greater HP regen using Dimates first. Telepies are useful to have, but if you didn’t feel like carrying them, they aren’t necessarily a critical resource.
Character Storage
Your character storage should hold items that you only wish to access using the individual character that you are currently playing. Again, these are only recommendations. Feel free to adjust this guidance to best meet your individual needs.
Storing weapons, units, and rings in this storage should be limited to high rarity gear and you should generally only keep things you are planning to use or weapons that you plan to use as enhancing materials. Any high-value items would be better utilized by sending them to an alt character for sale on the player shops. More detail will be provided on this process in the next section. You can check the value of an item through your inventory or storage screen by using the submenu for that item.
Default (Account) Storage
This storage is available to all characters on your account within your active ship. You will want to store items here that you would like all characters to be able to access as well as anything you intend to move from one character to another. Under this configuration, as a free-to-play player, the 200 item slots provided should be sufficient to contain all of the outlined item storage needs including gathering and crafting materials. If you do not wish to participate in gathering and crafting, those items may be discarded or sold on the player shops. More details for gathering will be provided in a later section.
One useful function of this is transferring items to an alt for free-to-play item selling via the player shops. By using an alt character to hold a stockpile of items, you can maximize your revenues from the 3-day shop pass item. These passes can be obtained as a rare drop from FUN scratch tickets.
FUN points can be obtained easily by receiving kudos, running missions with other players’ support avatars, or by exchanging EX Cubes in the EX Cube swap shop on the second floor of the shopping plaza at a 2:1 ratio for 1000 FUN points.
Exchanges, Transfers, and Discarding
The remaining items will either be exchanged for something more valuable, transferred to an alt for future sale on the player shops, or discarded outright. Notably, I have advised discarding all gathering items that are unable to be turned in for a quest. These items are used for crafting recipes in the cafe area and while these food items do give useful gathering buffs, the aggressive number of different items make these an unrealistic option for retaining. There is some value in selling the materials and meals on the player shop, but this would take a considerable amount of effort in moving items between alts. This is up to your discretion whether this is something you wish to take the time to do.
Gathering and Fishing
Should you choose to commit the time and effort toward gathering and fishing, there is good money to be made doing it and the item storage requirement is relatively mild. The following gathering and fishing items can be exchanged for 100k meseta each weekly and daily respectively.
The gathering items can be exchanged once a week with the NPC Yerkes in the cafe are.
The fishing items can be exchanged on random days for 100k meseta each at the Daily Order NPC in either the gate area or the cafe area. Likewise, Red Meat and Marbled Meat can on rare occasions also be exchanged at the Daily Order NPC for up to one full 999 stack.
Permanent Storage Expansion Option
Should you decide that you would like to increase you inventory capacity in exchange for a real-world money microtransaction, there is an option to increase your character storage and inventory permanently without the purchase of a premium set, which does expand your inventory temporarily but will eventually expire. If you find yourself enjoying the various additional game activities such as gathering and crafting and wish to extend your inventory capacity, these expansions are a good value for your investment and can be incredibly beneficial. These expansions can be obtained by first purchasing the required Arks Cash, then by navigating to the AC shop and scrolling down to the items near the bottom of she shop listing. You can spend 800 AC to permanently expand your character storage by increments of 50 up to a total 1000 item slots and your character inventory for 350 AC by increments of 10 up to a total of 100 slots. This is a permanent change to your account for that specific character that will never expire and need to be purchased again.
Customization and Google Doc
As stated before, I don’t propose any of this as a hard rule to follow, these are just basic guidelines to help you get started with developing your own system of organization and management. Feedback is appreciated, but do try to avoid arguments as this is really intended to be nothing more than a series of helpful suggestions.
Here is a link to a Google document in the event that you would like a list for quick reference.
Google Document Reference[docs.google.com]
I hope that this has been helpful and I’m glad to provide additional information if you have any questions. You can use the comments section below and I also stream PSO2 frequently on Twitch. You are welcome to engage with me their as well if you would like assistance in a real-time environment. I will provide the link for my channel below.
Twitch.tv/TQuinTV
Best of luck and happy hunting, ARKS!